Go West, Democrats, in the path of Harry Reid

Can a teetotaling Mormon from a busted mining town in
Nevada lead Democrats to the Promised Land of national power? This
much is certain: Democrats rallied behind Harry Reid in the hope
that he can take them safely through purgatory — or is it
hell? — as minority leader of the 44-member Democratic caucus
in the U.S. Senate.

Many doubted at first that a man with
his mild demeanor had the right stuff to represent underdog
Democrats at their nadir. I think Reid has what it takes.

First, he is an insider, known as one of the best players in the
inside game of the Senate, where deals are made in the cloakroom
and not on the floor. This means Reid will help shape the issues
that shape the future of Democrats.

Second, Reid’s
highest personal ambition is winning back the Senate for the
Democrats and then becoming majority leader. This means he will
cultivate and advance new leaders for the party.

Finally
— and as important as the others, but little noticed in the
national puzzlement over how Reid got where he is — he
understands the West. Nov. 2 indicates that the key to the
Democratic Party’s future nationally is in the West. The
signs are hopeful. Western Democrats did surprisingly well, even
though the states went for Bush.

How did Reid end up in
charge of a party most see as coastal and liberal? His hard-luck
biography says a lot. His father, a prospector and miner in
Searchlight, Nev., committed suicide when Reid was a young man. To
get a better education, Reid hitchhiked 40 miles each week to go to
high school in Henderson, near Las Vegas.

After college,
he worked his way through law school as a Capitol Hill cop in
Washington, D.C. Back in Nevada, he became head of the state gaming
commission and took on the mob in the casino industry. Reid is not
a big man, but he was a boxer in high school, a scrapper who puts
up a good fight.

Reid grew up in a backwater of the old
West, but came of age politically in a new West. The region was
transformed after World War II by military spending, the interstate
highway system, the rise of tourism and the growth of the
region’s metropolitan cities. Those forces came together to
make this the fastest-growing region in the country.

Las
Vegas, where Reid focused his political career, has been caught up
in this maelstrom of change. But Reid has also had to represent the
rest of Nevada as well, the mining towns, ranches and farms and
Indian reservations. He has learned to make important compromises
on mining, water, grazing, wilderness, and with Native American
tribes. What is most interesting about his compromises is that they
are not haphazard. They flow out of his vision of the
future.

Reid in his speeches and in personal interactions
tells one story over and over. In it, he is taking his wife to see
a spring hidden among the Joshua trees in the desert west of
Searchlight, where he went as a boy to escape his life. They find
the spring, but it has been trashed. Reid is heartbroken: It is one
beautiful thing from his past that he wanted to share with his wife
in the present. This is one of the few personal stories you will
hear from this reticent man. The other involves the suicide of his
father, which he only recently began to talk about.

What
do the stories signify? They tell him and his listeners that the
old ways have got to change. Those stories drive him to find a way
out of the dead-end dilemma of the old West, which sees compromise
as unmanly. What might Reid’s leadership of the Senate
minority mean for the West? He will do everything possible to stop
the proposed nuclear dump at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of
Las Vegas. And if the Senate minority leader can do one thing, it
is to clog up the system and delay action. Unlike the House of
Representatives, the majority in the Senate cannot ride roughshod
over the minority.

More important for the nation, Reid
will also be able to shape the legislative agenda behind the
scenes. If he can shape the Democratic agenda, he might succeed in
moving the party toward the center and toward the West. Reid could
be the instrument by which the West replaces the South as a key
part of a Democratic coalition, which once again makes that party a
contender.

Jon Christensen spent 12 years as a journalist
in Nevada and is currently on a graduate fellowship in history at
Stanford University in California.